Move over cougars – nougars are in town!

The Cougar has a competitor: the Nougar. Typically in her early to mid-30s — so about ten years younger than your average cougar — the nougar (which stands for new cougar, also known as cougarettes or pumas), refuses to grow up, take dating too seriously and thinks that because she’s still living like a 20-something she might as well go out with one, too.

While cougars such as Demi Moore and Courteney Cox hang up their Jimmy Choos and lick their wounds as their relationships with younger men founder, nougars are going on the hunt.

The poster girl for nougars is 32-year-old presenter Caroline Flack, who controversially dated One Direction’s Harry Styles, 18, last year.

I was a nougar once, too, when, aged 33, I dated the 23-year-old Duncan (reader, I’ve since married him).

He made the first move, as I wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching him: ironically, one of the reasons the relationship worked is that I had zero expectations given the age gap.

Fast forward a few years (we’re now, respectively, 40 and 30 and have been married for five years) and a new generation of women in their 30s seem far more confident about approaching younger men.

‘I’ve got nothing to prove,’ says Jen, a 34-year-old film publicist who has been dating Tim, a man 11 years her junior for the past three months. ‘My relationship happened pretty naturally: we got talking in a bar and just hit it off.

My attitude was, and is, “why not” Tim’s quite mature while I still have a wild side, so we even out. Who knows if it will last, but right now I’m having too much fun.’